Robert Colvile is a writer and senior comment editor at the Telegraph, who cares more about politics and policy than is probably healthy - for his newest pieces, please see here. He tweets as @rcolvile.

Nicolas Sarkozy isn't the new John Major – but David Cameron might be

Much amusement this morning at the thought that – according to Le Figaro – Nicolas Sarkozy intends to model his re-election campaign on John Major's against Neil Kinnock.

The argument goes that the incumbent can, like Major, win a come-from-behind victory at a time of economic uncertainty by focusing on the risks and costs of the Left-wing alternative. But that ignores the fact that Major won because, above all, he seemed like a safe pair of hands – a colourless, competent technocrat. It's hard to imagine Francois Hollande howling "Ca va bien!" at a hubristic eve-of-election rally – unlike Sarko, whose bumptious, bling-bling rhetorical style is far closer to the Welsh Windbag's.

What's interesting, however, is that there is a leader who is not inconsiderably influenced by Major: David Cameron. The Cameroons may have styled themselves, presentationally and politically, as the heirs to New Labour. But Cameron started out briefing Major for Prime Minister’s Questions, and ended up on the stairs behind Norman Lamont as we crashed out of the ERM. George Osborne, Andrew Lansley and others occupied similarly privileged positions.

These men came of age in a government brutalised not just by New Labour, but by its own disunity. Indeed, as the Eurosceptic Zulus surged towards the government of the day, the men now sitting in Cabinet were the poor bloody infantry trapped inside the fort – before heading home on public transport at a time when "Tory" was a four-letter word.

From that traumatic experience, they learned two overriding lessons. First, that the party’s brand needed to be decontaminated. And second, that a government held hostage by backbenchers is an extremely unpleasant thing to run. When Cameron made his “big, open and comprehensive offer” to the Lib Dems, he wasn't trying to form a Blairite big tent, but to avoid heading a minority government that would see him become the prisoner of his own MPs.

There is a surprising policy continuity, too. Cameron Conservatism, says Major, is “socially sympathetic but economically tough” – in short, the kind of Toryism he was groping towards. Tim Bale, in his history of the party, describes Major’s education policy as “reducing local authority control, more testing, less coursework, traditional methods, tougher inspections, and raised expectations”. That is a pretty decent approximation of Michael Gove’s reforms – as is GP fundholding of Andrew Lansley’s (until the heart was ripped out of them), or Ken Clarke’s as Justice Secretary of, well, of Ken Clarke’s as Home Secretary.

Beyond the turbulence and traumas, what defined Major’s approach to government were two ideas: the “Back to Basics” agenda of a more moral government, and the idea of the state as a provider of efficient, accountable and competitive services. The Citizen’s Charter, the Cones Hotline, the Charter Mark – these might have been mocked, but they were still an attempt to create responsive and market-based public services, answering to the consumer rather than Whitehall. That sounds remarkably Cameron-esque. And if it seems similar to Blair, it's probably because New Labour stole liberally from Major, for reasons both tactical and ideological.

There's a more alarming parallel, too. A few months ago, one Tory backbencher told me that a new saying was doing the rounds: "A U-turn a day keeps real change at bay." Some worry that Cameron’s initial radicalism is sinking back into the middle-of-the-road managerialism that characterised, and doomed, Major. Personally, I'm not convinced that it's time to reach for the grey underpants yet. But if it all goes wrong, Cameron could find himself remembered as Major Minor just as much as the Heir to Blair.